The advantages of the revisions to the template system balance against the loss of style compatibility. Additionally, the style incompatibility issue was one of the factors that influenced the decision to abandon the 2.2 revision number in favor of the 3.0 revision number. On all fronts, phpBB 3 breaks drop-in backward compatibility with phpBB 2.

phpBB 2.0 styles have had a long and productive life, in software terms. For good or ill, nothing in the computer world lasts indefinitely.

I agree with what is said here, the developers had to have dropped many things for new things. You won't make any improvements in software if everything is the exact same as the old version. You've only made a newer copy.
I think porting templates isn't going to be a hard task, renaming the variables, changing a bit of syntax, etc.. Although as a web designer, it might be just easier to recode it and add some improvements...

Last edited by TrevorB on Sun May 14, 2006 5:07 am, edited 1 time in total.